 |
|
|
|||||
Below, Nicholas Thompson shares five key insights from his new book, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports. Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic. In his time as CEO, the company has seen record subscriber growth. Before this role, he was editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. He is also a former contributor for CBS News and has previously served as editor. As a runner, he set the American record for men ages 45-plus in the 50K race. Whats the big idea? Running has the capacity to show us what were made of and help us grow beyond our limitsboth as we race ahead on the track and in life. Struggle, aging, and even trauma can become engines of transformation if we learn how best to keep moving forward. 1. You dont stop running because you get old. You get old because you stop running. I used to think that you would just get better and better with age until youre about 28, and then you would get worse and worse. But as Ive gotten older, Ive learned that isnt true. In fact, I ran my fastest marathon at age 44. Of course, there are certain things that decline in a runners life, as they do for everyone. Over the years, your bone density deteriorates, your VO2 max goes down, and youre more likely to get a little injured here or there. But while that happens, there are things that get better. We gain mitochondrial efficiency, for example, and most importantly, we get wiser. We have learned more about training. We have learned more about our limits. And not only that, but we can also pick up new habits to do things differently. In some ways, aging is like youre on a moving sidewalk that is going backwards, but youre picking up things that allow you to go forward. If you can go the same speed forwards as youre going backwards, then you run the same time year after yearwhich is what I did in my thirties. But sometimes, you can actually get better by going forward faster on that sidewalk than its pushing you backwardand thats what I did in my mid-forties. This applies beyond running. I had this conversation with my mother recently: Shes in her mid-seventies, and she said, Nick, my reflexes are just getting worse and worse with age. I said, There are things that are going to make your reflexes worse or worse with age, but what if we tried to go the other direction? Then I got her out on our front porch and I started tossing her tennis balls, and she started catching them. I tossed them a little more to the side, and it turned out that her reflexes could get better. Yes, aging is real. Unquestionably. There are many forces that slow us down, but what slows us down the most is when we give in and say, I dont want to do it today. When that happens, thats when you really start to slow down. Thats when you start to age. What you should do is push back as best you can. 2. Most pain is just a prediction. When I was a young runner, I believed that pain was purely physiological. I would exercise, my body would produce lactic acid, and the lactic acid would somehow trigger fatigue or your muscles would micro-tear and that would trigger pain signals. But as I got older, I read more studies, thought more, read the work of people like Alex Hutchinson and Tim Noakes, and realized that pain is something quite different when you run a race. Pain is weird. It moves all over the body. Maybe Ill feel it in my calf and then my quad, and then Ill feel like I have an upset stomach or Im nauseous, or dizzy, or experience general malaise. Maybe my shoulder will hurt. Whats going on? Its not that theres actually something wrong in my quad and then my knees and then my stomach. This is my brain having a conversation with the rest of my body. The brain is worried about losing homeostasis. It doesnt think that I can run this speed for this long. Maybe it doesnt think I can run 26.2 miles on this hot day, at this particular speed, and so its trying to slow me down because it doesnt want to enter a state where it could be at risk. During a race, pain is the brain trying to convince the body to slow down. If thats true, what does that mean about training? First, you should try to reset your brains expectations so that it doesnt get so scared. When Im in a marathon training cycle, I know that I cant run every day as hard as Im going to run on race day. But I try to stress each system in the body more on one day during the training cycle than I plan to on race day. Maybe that means using a single training day to run more than 26.2 miles. Maybe I run 20 miles while dehydrated. Maybe I will run 15 miles down a mountain to put extra stress on the quads. Its a way of getting the brain to understand that those levels of pain do not put me at risk. There are other things you can do, too. What resets the brains expectations when its hot? I like to rub ice on my wrist. This makes me feel a little cooler and a little better, but its also a way of resetting my brains expectations of what the temperature risks are. The great runner Eliud Kipchoge smiles when he starts to hurt. Its his way of trying to trick himself into feeling like hes okay and not worrying so much, and then the pain in the rest of his body can disappear. When running a 100K recently, I banged my toe against a root. My toenail split and stuck upthat hurt. That was real pain. That was physiological pain born of shouting nerve signals. I started to run, and I got really worried that maybe I couldnt travel the remaining distance. I think it was seven miles maybe, and I told myself I just couldnt do that. Thats when I started to hurt all over my whole body. Everything felt wrong. But then I got to an aid station, took off my shoe, took off my sock, taped down the bloody toenail, and I realized that my toenail would be fine. Once Id realized this, my whole body felt better. I didnt have to worry that something was going to go horribly wrong. This is a good lesson for life. Its a good reminder that, lots of times, what slows us down is in our own heads. Sometimes you must set an uncomfortable pace. Sometimes you must stress yourself. Whatever it is that you want to be really successful at, you have to go harder than you think you can. You have to use one part of your brain to trick another part of your brain. I call it playing hide and seek with your mind. 3. We all contain hidden versions of ourselves. I started running in high school and joined the indoor track team winter of my sophomore year. Went out and raced the 2-mile a bunch of times, ran 11 minutes and 45 seconds, then 11 minutes and 40 seconds, and at the end of the year, I was still locked in at that pace. At that point, I thought the best I could do would be 11 minutes and 30 seconds for two miles, 5 minutes and 45 seconds each. I knew the splits around the blue track at my high school, but the final race was the New England Championships, and it was hosted at a different school. The track there was a bit different, so when the race began, I didnt know exactly how fast I was running. I couldnt make sense of the splits. When I went through a mile, somebody called out 5:25. I thought they were joking, or something was wrong. I didnt believe I could run 5:25 for a mile . . . but then I finished the race and had run 10:48. Id taken my time down by 45 seconds. I was able to run what I thought was an unrealistic goal for myself because of the fact I didnt know how fast I was running. If I had known, I wouldnt have been able to go that fast./p> The same process happened 25 years later. When I was 30, in 2005, I ran a marathon at 2 hours and 43 minutes. Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I went through a terrifying treatment period. I knew I would survive. It wasnt the worst kind of cancer, but it was still scary, especially at 30 years old. Afterwards, I felt like I needed to run another marathon. So, two years later I ran the New York City Marathon again in exactly 2 hours and 43 minutes. For the next 11 years, I continued to run marathons at almost exactly 2 hours and 43 minutes. In fact, I had the nickname Mr. 2-4-3. But then in my mid-forties, I started training differently. I had a coach who had me train faster, do shorter workouts, do sprints, eat a little differently, and I ended up running at 2 hours and 29 minutes. This was a completely different level of success. Why was I able to run these marathons in 2 hours and 29 minutes in my mid mid-forties, but my personal best was 2 hours and 43 minutes in my late twenties? One day, I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge and realized that I hadnt gone faster than 2 hours and 43 minutes in my thirties because thats not what I had wanted. All I had wanted to do was to go as fast as I had run before I got sick. I needed someone to reframe my expectations, to tell me that there was a faster Nick inside of me to help me. That push from my coach helped me understand that I could actually be more than I had been before I was sick. This got me to believe in myself at some deep level, and then I could run it. Sometimes our limits are in our heads. We only think we can go so far. We truly believe that limit, but we have to unlock it to go further. Maybe we can unlock it ourselves. Maybe somebody else unlocks it. Theres a different version locked inside of you who can be found. 4. You can reach transcendence through restraints. Ive always wanted to reach a level of transcendenceto step outside of the body I live in during the day, to break outside of the Nick whose mind is wired to his desk and to-do list focused. I wanted to feel like Ive reached a new spiritual plane and a deeper understanding of the world. To feel more at one with the universe, I run up mountains: as the sun comes up, deep in the forest, even losing track of where I am. Its a beautiful, glorious experience. But as I worked on the book, I realized that there are runners who are reach transcendence in almost the opposite way. I spent a lot of time with an amazing runner named Suprabha Beckjord, who won the 3,100-mile race in Queens, New York, for nine consecutive years. The way that race works is you run around a single block all day, every day. We run clockwise one day, counterclockwise the other. You start at six in the morning with a minute of meditation, and then have to be done by midnight. You go home and sleep until start time the next morning. You return to the track and do it over and over again. The race starts in August and ends in October. One person said, Its not a real race unless you have to get your hair cut in it. One year, somebody had their visa expire in the middle of the race. Suprabha taught me an important lesson. When running around the same block over and over, if you start thinking about your surroundings and what youre doing, youll go crazy. So, you learn mental practices. You learn to imagine that you are a child running in the woods. You learn to escape the boundaries of where you are. You learn to think at a much deeper level. You learn to meditate as you run. I also spent time writing about a runner named Michael Westphal. He lived on Great Cranberry Island, Maine, which has a population of about 40 people. Of that tiny population, six of their people became sub-three-hour marathoners. They ran on the same beautiful two-mile road, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Because of the tiny island, because of the tiny community, because of the restraints on what could be done there, they were able to reach a level of excellence. Westphal also taught me by a different kind of constraint. Later in his life, he was diagnosed with Parkinsons disease. First, he wanted to hide it, found it embarrassing, but then he realized that he loved to run, and he was going to run despite having Parkinsons. He figured out a way to run with his illness by tying his hands behind his back with string. He learned a whole new way of running. It was a different kind of restraint. It taught him humility and a sense of connection with other runners. He said something beautiful to me: Theres more to running than just beating people. You can reach transcendence through restraints. 5. Post-traumatic growth can be a subtle but serious competitive advantage. Not long ago, I was with Arthur Brooks. He writes about happiness for The Atlantic. Hes a real scholar of the field, and I asked him, Arthur, whats the number one thing that can make someone happy and content in life? He said, Well, its a weird one and you cant really force it. I said, Okay, what is it? And he said, Get cancer and survive it. When he said that, a light bulb went off. In my twenties, my running and my work was kind of a mess. As a runner, I was trying to break three hours in the marathon. That had been my fathers goal. He had come close, but not achieved it. I didnt come close at all. I ran marathon after marathon, sometimes dropping out or walking the second half. As for work, I got fired from my first job in less than an hour. My second job, I was almost fired before I started. I struggled and struggled, then had one brief period of success at a place called The Washington Monthly. But after that, I couldnt get freelance gigs. I applied for hundreds of jobs in my late twenties. I was making more money as a street musician playing guitar on the L Train than I was as a journalist. In my thirties and forties, everything got better on both those fronts. I ran much faster. My work got much better: great job at Wired, great job with The New Yorker, wonderful job right now helping run The Atlantic. In between, there was when I got thyroid cancer and faced death for the first time in my life. What Arthur Brooks said and what the studies show is that if you stand at the precipice of death and walk away, you take life more seriously afterward. To me, I think what happened was somewhat paradoxical. After my cancer experience, my goals narrowed in some ways. Instead of constantly shooting for the moon and thinking I should have everything all at once, I became more methodical about just doing what I could every day. This is the trick to running successfully, too. Yes, you do absolutely have to push yourself if you want to get better, but the most important part is learning to run every day. No matter what the weather is, no matter how you feel, no matter how much time you haveyou just go out and do it. I took that attitude toward running and work. I began asking myself, What is the best thing that I can do today? How can I do my job better today than I did it yesterday? That attitude change came partly from my thyroid cancer journey, but there are different ways people can go through an experience like that. Not just cancer, but medical scares or personal scares. When you come out the other side, you can make choices that lead to more success in whatever you set your mind to. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
Fintech firm Mercury recently dropped some data that made me smile. It ranked the top five coffee shops powering founders in San Francisco based on actual transaction data: Sightglass, CoffeeShop, Equator, Saint Frank, Ritual. I’ve built Octolane with my cofounder, Rafi, from every single one of them. But here’s what the data doesn’t show: the $500,000 investment term sheet I negotiated over a cortado at Cafe Réveille. The $800,000 deal I closed while sitting next to a grad student cramming for finals. The three customers who became friends, then advocates, then our biggest champions, all because we met first over coffee, not Zoom. When I was in high school, I cleaned offices at night, empty offices with ergonomic chairs and standing desks and those motivational posters about “innovation.” Meanwhile, I’m building an AI company worth millions from a wobbly table at a coffee shop, and somehow this feels more real, more honest than any corner office ever could. The distributed office isn’t dead, it just moved to cafés. I wake up at 5 a.m. here in San Francisco, because those three hours before the city stirs are mine. I review what our AI models learned overnight. I write. I think. Then I head to whichever coffee shop matches my energy that day. Saint Frank when I need to focus, since it’s quieter, more intimate. Sightglass when I want that productive hum of energy around me. Equator when I’m meeting someone for the first time and want them to feel comfortable, not intimidated. Rafi, my cofounder and CTO, moved internationally to build this with me. One of our engineers handles the front end from one continent, another tackles the back end from another. So why would I pay $8,000 a month for an office in SoMa (the neighborhood South of Market Street) when I can spend $200 a month on lattes and have the entire city of San Francisco as my workspace? What I’ve Learned Building in Public (Literally) The serendipity factor is real. Last month, I was debugging a particularly nasty prompt engineering issue, trying to get our AI to detect deals in Gmail without false positives. I was muttering to myself (yes, I’m that guy) when someone at the next table leaned over: “Are you working on LLM classification?” Turns out hes an AI researcher at Anthropic. Twenty minutes later, I had a completely new approach that cut our error rate in half. You can’t engineer that in a conference room. Practical wisdom. Keep your screen visible enough that interesting work attracts curious people, but angle it so you’re not broadcasting sensitive customer data. The sweet spot is showing code or product UIs, technical enough to spark conversations with the right people, general enough to protect privacy. Investors are humans too. The $500,000 investment I mentioned? It happened because I was at Réveille at 3 p.m., and so was he. We were the only two people there. We chatted and he learned more about what I was working on. I showed him our productnot a deck, not a demo, just the actual thing, running, solving a real problem. He saw me working, grinding, building. The next day, the term sheet came through. Later he told me: “I invested because youre willing to be different and bold to stand out.” What he didn’t say, but I know mattered: Other founders had already told him about the guy who’s always at Réveille, laptop open, building. And when he left that day, I was still there. Midnight founder cafés are a thing now: late-night coffee shop takeovers where founders and engineers gather to build, network, and fuel up on free caffeine, and big AI companies are leaning into it. Cursor’s been running “Café Cursor” pop-ups across San Francisco, New York, Stanford, even Guadalajara, taking over coffee shops for a day, giving out free coffee and those coveted keychains, merch thats shaped like the tab keyboard key (a nod to the keystroke that accepts Cursor’s AI suggestions). Anthropic did a weeklong Claude Café pop-up in New York City’s West Village that drew more than 5,000 people, with their “thinking” hats becoming so viral that people claimed they flew across the country just to get one. These aren’t permanent cafés, they’re pop-up experiences. But that’s exactly the point. They’re recognizing what we already know: The best AI work happens in liminal spaces. Not quite work, not quite social. Somewhere in between. That’s where the guard comes down: You’re not pitching, you’re just talking. And the person debugging next to you might casually mention the fix you’ve been stuck on for a week. And it goes deeper than corporate activations. There’s a founder in the Mission District of San Francisco who literally opened his house as a café after midnight. Just for founders. No tourists, no meetings, just people building. I’ve been there twice. Both times, I left with ideas I couldn’t have found anywhere else. The only AI company that’s actually opened a permanent café? Perplexity, in Seoul. But even they get it! They put a podcast studio and a single computer running their search engine in the basement. The coffee shop isn’t the product. The community is. The Practical Reality (Because Romance Only Gets You So Far) Here’s what they don’t tell you about the coffee shop life: You need three spots minimum. One for deep work (quiet, consistent Wi-Fi, you know the outlet situation). One for meetings (good acoustics, professional-ish vibe, not too loud). One for when the first two are full or you just need a change. Noise-canceling headphones are nonnegotiable. But here’s the thing: I don’t always use them. Sometimes I want to hear the ambient noise, the conversations, the espresso machine. It reminds me that I’m building something for real people, not just for the AI models or the pitch deck. Your burn rate matters. Every dollar matters. An office in San Francisco costs $5,000 to $10,000 minimum. That’s a month of runway. That’s an engineer. That’s 100-plus customer acquisition attempts. So yeah, I’ll take the $5 latte. Time-of-day strategy is everything. I’ve mapped it out. Early morning: Saint Frank or home (deep work, model review, writing) 8 a.m. to noon: Sightglass or Equator (customer calls, team syncs) Noon to 3 p.m.: Avoid peak lunch chaos, take meetings walking or find a quieter spot 3 to 6 p.m.: Ritual or CoffeeShop (energy picks back up, good for creative work) After 6 p.m.: Usually home, but the midnight café if I need the founder energy What Building from Coffee Shops Taught Me About AI There’s a parallel here that keeps itting me: AI works best when it has context. Every engineer here is building on the idea that AI should understand the full context of your communication, not just isolated data points. Coffee shops give me context. I see how people actually work. I hear what founders are struggling with. I feel the energy when someone closes a deal or the deflation when funding falls through. You can’t get that from a dashboard or a user interview. You have to be there, in it, living it. When I’m prompt engineering at 9 a.m. at Saint Frank, watching the barista dial in the espresso, I’m thinking about patterns. About how humans and machines both learn through repetition, through feedback, through context. The best prompts I’ve written came from coffee shops. The best features we’ve built came from problems I overheard someone complaining about two tables over. The deeper insight is that building in isolation makes you optimize for the wrong things. You optimize for elegance, for technical beauty, for what impresses other engineers. Building in public, literally surrounded by your users, keeps you grounded in what actually matters: Does this solve a real problem for a real person? Building from coffee shops keeps me honest. I can’t hide behind the performance of “founder working in office.” I can’t pretend to be productive when I’m not. If I’m stuck, I’m stuck in public. If I’m building, I’m building where people can see the mess, the mistakes, the reality. We’re trying to replace Salesforce with Octolane. That’s aggressive, maybe delusional. But I’ll tell you this: I’d rather chase it from a coffee shop in the Mission, surrounded by other founders equally delusional and equally committed, than from a sterile office where everyone pretends to have it figured out. How to Actually Make This Work If you’re thinking about ditching the office, here’s what I wish someone had told me: Map your energy to your spaces. Don’t just pick a coffee shop because it’s close. Figure out what work you do best where. I write best at quieter spots. I sell best in energetic spaces. I code best with moderate ambient noise. Become a regular somewhere. Not everywhere, somewhere. One spot where they know your order, where you have your table, where you’re part of the ecosystem. For me, it’s Réveille. That consistency matters when everything else is chaos. Respect the space. Buy something every two to three hours. Tip well. Don’t monopolize tables during peak times. The coffee shop isn’t your free office, it’s a business that’s subsidizing your dream. Honor that. Build relationships, not just networks. That Anthropic engineer? We’re friends now. The investor? We get coffee every few weeks. The other founders? We text each other when we’re heading to a spot. This only works if you’re actually present, actually human, actually building relationships. Know when to go home. Sometimes you need silence. Sometimes you need privacy. Sometimes you need to take a call that can’t happen in public. Don’t force it. The coffee shop is a tool, not a religion. The Launch Is Coming I’ll probably launch our product from a coffee shop. Maybe Saint Frank, maybe Réveille, maybe that midnight café in the Mission. My team will be distributed across the country, asleep in some time zones, working in others. And somehow, we’ll pull it off. Because the best work doesn’t happen in offices. It happens where life happens. Where the coffee is strong, the Wi-Fi is reliable enough, and the person next to you might just have the insight that changes everything. Mercury’s data showed the top five coffee shops powering SF founders. What it didn’t show is why. It’s not the coffee. It’s not even the Wi-Fi. It’s the reminder that you don’t need permission to build something great. You just need conviction, a laptop, and a table. See you at the café.
Category:
E-Commerce
Gen Zers, who were practically born with smartphones and iPads in their hands, have grown up completely immersed in the information highway. Therefore, it should come as no big surprise that those born as digital nativesdeeply connected to culture, trends, politics, and businesshave different ideas about what their contributions to the world should look like. They deeply value work-life balance and they need to feel like the work they do has meaning. Globally, they are the generation most concerned about issues like corruption and inequality. They’re striving to create changeand they’re committed. Still, Gen Zers often get called out for being entitled, lazy, or simply not being driven. However, according to a recent conversation between executive Garry Ridge, former CEO of WD-40, and Simon Sinek, author and thought leader, it’s not a lack of commitment or drive that sets Gen Z apart in the workplace. It’s a well-earned lack of trust in leadership. On his podcast, A Bit of Optimism, Sinek posed a question to his guest about why Gen Z seems to work backward when compared to past generations. Contrary to the old playbook, where employees were expected to work hard and showcase their commitment before getting a raise, a promotion, or other payout, Gen Z needs to see the reward up front. “That could be interpreted as entitlement,” Sinek said. “I understand it as they grew up in a world where there’s no loyalty from the company.” Basically, if a company doesn’t have an employee’s back, should the employee really be expected to hustle for said company? Gen Z doesn’t think so. In his conversation with Sinke, Ridge agreed, noting that the logic is completely understandable, given the generation’s deep distrust of big business. Ridge asserted that companies shouldn’t dismiss these young employees as lazy or unmotivated. Rather, they should work with them to build that essential trust, providing more frequent and clear-cut steps to move up the ladder. “Once upon a time you had these reviews where you were actually looking backward. Well, maybe now the way to go is having steps along the way so you can recognize performance, Ridge said, using the example of giving employees the opportunity to earn accolades by having check-ins every couple of months to assess performance. Further, Ridge and Sinek agreed that year-end reviews aren’t a great stepping stone, either. And, from that lens, maybe Gen Z is spot-on when it comes to phasing out the old system. “I don’t want to wait 364 days for you to tell me what I should’ve done better or how good I’ve done,” Ridge explained of the Gen Z mindset. “What I want to do is be coached along the way.” Call them lazy and entitled all you want, but Gen Zers, many of them having watched their parents work hard their whole lives with little to show for it financially in their later years, don’t want to hustle without a clear payout. Honestly, who could blame them?
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||